As if consumers didn’t have enough to worry about, Congress and California’s Legislature may soon try their hands at designing smartphones.

A state bill that would require a “kill switch” on all smartphones sold in California after July 1, 2015, could come up for a vote Thursday. Democrats in the U.S. Senate have announced similar legislation.

In one sense, lawmakers are in their classic posture of lagging behind technology. Apple Inc. has built GPS tracking (called Find My iPhone) and remote data erasure into iPhones since 2009.

The bill by state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, would essentially require everybody to have a cool upgrade Apple rolled out in September called Activation Lock, which comes with its iOS 7 operating system.

Now if your iPhone is lost or stolen, you can use another Apple gadget or the Internet to lock the device, making it hard for someone else to reactivate it as a phone. Apple says 88 percent of its users are running iOS 7.

Samsung’s recently released Galaxy S5 has similar capabilities. And last month, in a transparent move to avoid government mandates, major manufacturers and wireless carriers agreed to expand anti-theft technology to every phone by July 2015.

So the question becomes why lawmakers find it necessary to get involved.

For openers, police are feeling heat from the growing ranks of victims. One-third of U.S. robberies involve phone theft, says the Federal Communications Commission.

If every phone could quickly be transformed into a battery-operated paperweight, the theory goes, then robbers would stop stealing them.

There are several problems with the theory.

It took a hacker just days to “jailbreak” the very first iPhone model in 2007 for use on competing carrier systems. Smart thieves will inevitably hack locked phones for resale, while dumb thieves will find customers who recycle smartphone parts. And national security experts worry about cyber-warriors using kill switches to bring down millions of phones at once, including those used by government officials.

Setting aside such realities, it’s also clear the wireless industry has annoyed customers by doing too little to prevent theft.

I’ve been cranky since 2010, when somebody swiped my iPhone 3GS from a gym treadmill while I was getting a drink of water about 15 feet away.

At the time, Find My iPhone was enough of a novelty that a police officer tracked my phone to a nearby house. But when nobody answered the door, he gave up the search.

So I called AT&T. Surely the company could use my phone’s unique identifier, which AT&T happily uses each month to bill me, to prevent anyone from ever making calls on my iPhone.

Nope. We don’t maintain such a theft-flagging database, the customer service person said; call Apple. Apple, of course, told me to contact AT&T, which helpfully offered to sell me a new phone.

I’ve heard versions of this story from many people. This leads to a conspiracy theory: Those dastardly wireless giants want people to steal phones, because it pushes victims into an early upgrade.